How to Use Categories & Tags In WordPress for SEO Purpose

WordPress categories & tags help webmasters to organize their website posts, improve its ranking in search engines and help users to find the exact content quickly & easily. Despite the huge significance of these two, several inexperienced WordPress users use categories and tags inappropriately on their websites, which decreases the effectiveness of their SEO efforts. Even web visitors face difficulties to meet their objectives around their websites.

In this article, we will discuss as how to use categories & tags to optimize your website and get the desired results.

Categories & Tags: Basic details-

Categories

In fact, categories are pre-defined words or phrases, which allows you to separate your content based on broad classification. Even most of the SEO professionals get confused about the total number of categories they should make on their websites. In general, you must keep the number of categories minimum as far as possible and arrange them in such a way that users can easily sense the nature of your posts available in a particular category and navigate through it easily. However, there is no specific rule about the maximum number of categories that one must have on his/her site.

Tags

In simple language, tags are keywords or phrases, which give the specific details about your site’s post (to visitors) and direct them to other similar posts. Generally, SEO professionals overuse tags on their websites/blogs, which don’t help them in their SEO efforts. Use tags frequently, but don’t repeat similar tags in all posts.

How to Create Categories & Tags in Your WordPress Website?

In order to create categories and tags on your WordPress website, go to the admin area> Posts> All Posts. Now choose the post you want to add a category/subcategory/tag. Go to the Bulk Actions tab, choose the Edit option and press the Apply button once everything is finished. Alternatively, you can use WordPress plugins to add categories and tags in your post.

Things To Keep In Mind

Dos List in Categories

1. When you create categories on your website, capitalize your category titles to help visitors identify them easily,

2. Use simple, clear and descriptive category names. New visitors, who have never been to your website, can easily have a clear idea about the type of content they will get by clicking your category names.

3. Think of using sub-categories for dealing with complicated and hierarchical topics. On WordPress websites, you can set 3 levels of categories. In case you use sub-categories, make use of breadcrumbs also to help visitors navigate through your website easily and find their location.

4. Structure your categories in such a way that all of your posts may relate to at least one category.

5. If possible, use only one category for most of your website posts. It will keep you exempted from redesigning your website time and again. If you want to use more than one category for a single post, restrict them to maximum 2-3 categories.

Don’ts List in Categories

1. Although, there is no restriction on the maximum number of categories on a website/blog, but you must avoid using too many categories. It will confuse your visitors.

2. Don’t use more than one category for most of the posts available on your website and

3. Don’t create a specific category for topics you are not going to write about in near future. You can link such posts with tags.

Dos List in Tags

1. You must use tags carefully. There is no need that a tag should be the summary of the entire post. Give the brief information only about the posts.

2. Make tags useful and attractive for visitors by using quotes, hashtags, phrases, etc, because they link different posts together and help visitors to navigate through your website easily and quickly,

3. Keep tags simple and descriptive. Keep the anchor text and permalinks clear to help search engines and users to understand them quickly.

Don’ts List in Tags

1. Avoid capitalizing tags as it is not required,

2. Don’t make a tag which is applicable to one post only. Make sure your tags are not too specific,

3. Ensure that the tags you use are not the duplicates of your categories,

4. Although there is no hard and fast rule about the maximum number of tags to your content, but don’t use too many tags on your websites as for each tag, you have to make a new archive page on your website/blog. If you have to handle a large amount of content, you can consider merging tags that link only 2-3 posts together.

Endnote

Categories and tags are two important taxonomies WordPress offers you to organize your content and hone the outcome of your SEO exercise. However, most of the site admins are unaware of how to use categories and tags properly to reap the maximum benefits. Just implement the above- mentioned recommendations and help your visitors to navigate easily through your website and spend more time on it.

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Lucy Barret

Lucy Barret is working for a leading HTML to Wordpress Company, HireWPGeeks Ltd. as a Sr. WordPress Developer with over 5 years of experience. She is also a writer and cherishes every opportunity of contributing as a guest author at top blogs.

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